Link for great books or sf class

A review of Carol Emshwiller's Secret City.

Geoff Ryman's argument argument for mundane SF.

When the going gets tough, the tough get surreal!

I found this great site with links to contemporary surreal art.

Among many others, I really like Laurie Lipton's drawings. Scroll down and check out "Haunted," "Inner City," and "The Unspeakable Dinner Party."

I warned you!!

Remember the good old days, when the murder rate was going down (and I was arguing that rappers were responsible for it)? Well, them days are dead and gone, if I may.

But, what's the surprise? There's a grim determinism at work here. All during the 90s the worst off were actually improving their economic condition. Since that goddam dipshit GW stole the election, the worst off were getting worse, while the best off were stealing the store. (Check out the 2nd column from the left. Ignore the first set of stats, under "Current Dollars"; apparently Census Bureau types think "current" means "contemporaneous").

In the Mood for Love

The ‘restless moment’ and mood of uncertainty that defines both the protagonists and the era is significant within In the Mood for Love. Indeed, Wong’s films may not be directly or overtly political, however there is often an "indirect relation to the political" via Wong’s conveying of "a particularly intense experience of the period as an experience of the negative; an experience of some elusive and ambivalent cultural space that lies always just beyond our grasp".

A. Abbas, "The Erotics of Disappointment" Wong Kar-wai. Ed. J. Lalanne, D. Martinez, A. Abbas & J. Ngai. Paris: Dis Voir, 1997, p. 41.

This is great! I can write something about a movie and not have to cross all my t-s and dot my i-s.

A while back I watched Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, a quiet little movie set in 1962 Hong Kong, that uses a slew of imagery from the past, particularly music and dress to evoke that time and place.

Wong himself is Shanghainese, but his family moved to Hong Kong when he was five years old. Some critics have argued that he couldn’t know what Hong Kong was like back then. So, in a perhaps futile (hence the quote above) attempt to recover what he never had, Wong obsessively uses the imagery of that by-gone era, imagery he’s mined from movies, magazines, music and fashion.

The movie centers on two thirty-something types, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who, after they move into adjacent apartments, begin to realize that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. The movie very poetically details the course of Mo-wan and Li-zhen’s relationship, which, though they are attracted to each other, remains platonic, because, as Li-zhen says, “We’re better than them.” Cold comfort indeed. But there’s this sense that they’re both missing out on an opportunity, that something is slipping by just beyond their grasp. And the erotic charge in the movie centers precisely on that, on the almost-but-never-quite realized.

So, Wong’s use of the material from that era as a way to evoke the era that would have been just beyond his grasp is thematized in the relationship between Li-zhen and Mo-wan. In the same way that he cannot quite recover early 60s Hong Kong they can’t quite consummate their relationship.

True, as far as it goes. But there’s more to the movie than that. First, no one can really recover the past at all. It’s dead and gone for all of us, and what we retain of it are only the artifacts that preserve in one way or another the faint scent of yesterday that might accidentally jolt us into reexperiencing what that past was like. But there’s a more powerful sense in which what Wong is doing is actually making 1962 Hong Kong for us. In fact, no matter how many madelines (or the Chinese equivalent) I might sniff, I’m never ever going to remember my experience in Hong Kong, because I had none. But the power in Wong’s movie is to make that Hong Kong come alive. Now, Hong Kong in that era exists for me, in powerfully evocative fashion, but the poignancy of what I never had is made palpable by the actors portraying that frustrated passion of the missed opportunity.

In fact that is what Li-zhen and Mo-wan do themselves. The movies become a way for them to come to terms with their spouses’ infidelities, or at least to understand that infidelity. At least twice we see the couple enact what their spouses do.

In the first example, they play out the first encounter between their cheating spouses, and Mo-wan says something about how beautiful Li-zhen’s eyes are, as being an example of what her husband must have said to his wife. But Li-zhen dismisses this: “my husband wouldn’t talk like that”. They then move on to another scenario, in which Li-zhen moves the back of her hand towards Mo-wan’s belt (pretty sexy!) but then she breaks it off saying that she can’t imagine how the spouses could do this.

This scene could have been shot realistically, but Wong ends the first half of the reenactment with an abrupt cut, as though we were actually watching outtakes of the film, and seeing how Wang arrived at the particular telling he did. So, in that moment, we see the couple doing what a movie maker him- or herself would do, try out the possibilities and see what would make sense, or at least to try to make sense out of what they see.

So when Wong uses all the pop culture of the era as a way to evoke it he seems to be doing only what he would do in any other movie. He takes the reality that is available to him, the artifacts of the culture, the things that happened and he runs them by us

The couple’s reenactment of that first move is just a miniature version of what Wong is doing in the movie itself. He shows us the process he used to arrive at his vision of that by-gone Hong Kong: the clichés or pop culture (which he obviously loves) are selected and rejected for their fidelity to reality or, failing that, for their evocation of the past. My husband wouldn’t talk like that? Well try out another endearment. And Wong must shuttle back and forth between trying to find that particular artifact that works and what he actually remembers.

Kong review

I finally got around to seeing King Kong the other night, and I guess I’m in agreement with just about the whole world in thinking it’s a pretty good flick. The special effects are almost completely flawless (with the possible exception of the dinosaur stampede, which is still such a cool idea I don’t even care if the execution is less than perfect), the acting (about which more later) is generally good, the action scenes are nicely balanced with some nice heart-string tugging, and the pacing (mostly) keeps you focused for the three-hours plus running time.

Someone, unsurprisingly, has pointed out the possibly racist subtext, particularly with regards to the completely creepy and unredeemed Maori mob, whose only purpose is to scare the daylights out of, or savagely kill, or both, the sympathetic and extremely white main characters. This subtext is only slightly undercut by the Maoris’ association with Kong, who, after scaring the daylights out of Naomi Watts, winds up being completely sympathetic.

This subtext is made a little more complicated by the movie’s being about making a movie, kind of like Day for Night (except with a giant gorilla.) I don’t think I’m spilling any beans to reveal that the white characters are on Skull Island, Kong’s home, so they can get the appropriately primitive location shots for a movie they are making, a movie that is going to star the character Watts plays. When the filming abruptly goes south (after the aforementioned native terrorizing occurs), and Kong has kidnapped the star, she escapes by entertaining Kong: she performs a medley of bits and pieces from the vaudeville act we’ve seen her do when she was first introduced to us. Kong, who was apparently going to just tear her to pieces like a rag doll, is at first non-plussed by Watt’s character’s performance, then entertained, and finally ticked off when she finally says she can’t do any more performing.

So, since we ultimately sympathize with Kong, we could see the movie as being about us, the audience, falling hopelessly in love with the leading lady, and how our love is doomed. And, I’m guessing that the creepy affect generated by the Maori might owe at least some of its inspiration to the way fans strike a celeb who’s had just a little too much fame. If you look at the tribe’s depiction this way, then the Maori are simply a reflection of ourselves, with the reflection having a nice ironic touch, since, of course, the typical audience for King Kong is nothing like a tribe of savages.

At any rate, Kong realizes his love is doomed, and basically commits suicide by letting himself get cornered on the Empire State Building, where, in a spectacular scene, he is gunned down by a squad of machine-gunning biplanes. (Warning: this scene is an acrophobe’s nightmare.) Admittedly, Kong’s suicidal impulse is an extreme reaction to the movie-going experience, but I’m sympathetic. I felt the same way after watching About Schmidt.

About Watt’s performance. As I noted, we first see her as a vaudeville performer, and several scenes, besides the one I’ve mentioned, require Watt’s to act like, well, an actor. She does a great job doing this in the scene with Kong, where her fictive acting has as a motivation her saving her own skin. In this case, she’s got something outside of the acting as a way to give her performance some weight. But, earlier on, on the deck of the steamer the movie crew is taking to Skull Island, we see Watts being filmed looking out over the ocean, and, in this shot, she is positively luminescent. I wouldn’t take much note of this, except that she usually strikes me as being a so-so actor, not bad, but nothing great. And then she’ll do some scene like this one in Kong, or like the audition scene in Mulholland Dr., and I’ll think she’s amazing. Maybe she was born not to be an actor, but to play one.

At least they canned Judy Miller

Tom Tomorrow has a good post on a peculiar tic among writers at the New York Times:

Specifically, it appears to be an unwritten rule at the Times that no article about either (a) memory or (b) cookies–or even (c) the sense of smell–can be published without a mention, preferably in the lede paragraph, of Proust and/or his madeleines.

Now, I could just simply have walked away from Tom's observation, quietly chuckling and shaking my head at the pretenses of some people. But, no, I won't let myself be outdone by any fancy-pants big-city types! So apropos of nothing, I thought I should point out how the Vapors (of "Turning Japanese" fame) also remind "one" of Proust, particularly that Proust that shows up a little later than the first 50 pages or so of Remembrance of Things Past. Here's the Vapors' bid for immortality, 80s, new wave wankery-style:

I’ve got your picture, I’ve got your picture
I’d like a million of them all round my cell
I want the doctor to take your picture
So I can look at you from inside as well

And here’s Proust talking about the girls Marcel hangs out with:

It is understood, of course, that this loyalty to the first and purely physical impressions which I formed afresh at each encounter with my friends did not involve only their facial appearance, since the reader has seen that I was sensible also of their voices, more disquieting still, perhaps (for not only does a voice offer the same strange and sensuous surfaces as a face, it issues from that unknown, inaccessible region the mere thought of which sets the mind swimming with unattainable kisses) . . . .

By the way: all of Remembrance of Things Past on-line!

Teaching tips

We're having an important discussion on pedagogy over at Left of the Mississippi. Be sure and read the comments.